I thought quite a lot about how to handle money and came up with a – you guessed it – simple system. It involves some bank accounts and automated payments.

My main account takes care of things like rent, insurance payments and so on. The basic monthly costs are covered there. From that account, I transfer investment, backup and my "monthly allowance" into other accounts. I donate some money per month automatically to The Ocean Cleanup. From my investment savings, I buy one ETF monthly on a savings plan.

Whatever is left over at the end of the month goes into the savings account. That's it. Set up once, I don't even think about it anymore. I can use my monthly allowance, the rest is automated away. Simple.

That's an interesting topic. I guess the "managing options" idea from sports & diet applies here as well. Everyone has ideas. Everyone has shortcuts or "safe" investments they think will do the trick. Me too. I tried individual stocks. Too stressful. I thought about trading options. Too much hassle. I dabbled with some cryptocurrencies. That's playing, not investing.

I cut out retirement plans where I was either just parking the money because the costs ate the possible gains. Or in worse cases even would have lost money across the years due to the costs. Calculate the costs of your investments. It does not take a lot of time, but future you (that one again…) will be very thankful years from now that you took that one hour on that one Sunday.

What I stick with is investing in some ETFs. It has the savings plan for the main ETF. I rebalance the rest from time to time. That's it. A whole lot of mental capacity freed up by… well, actually by not doing a lot.